University News
Grant of $10 Million from Hewlett Foundation Will Support The China Law Center of Yale Law School
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has announced that it will donate $10 million to support The China Law Center of Yale Law School for five years.
From its inception in 1999, The China Law Center has focused on designing and carrying out in-depth cooperative projects between U.S. and Chinese experts on key issues of Chinese law and policy reform. In interaction with its teaching and research missions, the Center also works to strengthen the capacity of reformers in China, partnering with a range of Chinese institutions such as law schools, courts, administrative agencies and non-governmental organizations.
The grant, which will provide general support to the Center's programs over five years, is among the largest foundation grants ever made to a Yale Law School program.
Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest said supporting the evolution of China's legal system is invaluable to the country's emergence on the world stage. "Helping China improve its legal system furthers an array of goals, from supporting civil rights and civil liberties to increasing China's effectiveness in business," Brest said. "It's of global importance for China to have the best possible legal system. The Foundation is proud to help with this effort."
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the nation's largest, with assets of more than $8 billion, makes grants to address the most serious social and environmental problems facing society. The Foundation concentrates its resources on activities in education, environment, global development, performing arts and population.
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Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Awards $1 Million Grant to Caltech for New Research Laboratory
The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation has pledged $1 million to the California Institute of Technology toward construction of a new building for chemistry and chemical engineering positioned to be the centerpiece of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering's plan for the future.
The new facility will be especially important in the Division's plans to further integrate teaching and research initiatives in chemistry and chemical engineering with other areas of science and engineering. The building is being named the Warren and Katharine Schlinger Laboratory for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in recognition of a lead commitment toward the $35 million project from the alumnus and his wife.
With approximately 60,000 square feet divided among three levels above ground and one basement level, the building will house seven research laboratories, one classroom and three smaller conference rooms. The Schlinger Laboratory will face San Pasqual Walk between the Noyes Laboratory of Chemical Physics and the Beckman Laboratories of Behavioral Biology, and will complete a cluster of buildings with complementary research activities.
Once constructed, the Schlinger Laboratory will support several research groups involved in projects aimed at new and synthetically useful chemical transformations with novel catalysts, the synthesis of complex organic molecules important in biology and medicine, and custom-designed polymers and nanometer-scale structures. Current plans call for the third floor to be committed entirely to organic synthesis.
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Gov. Perry Appoints Three To The Texas A&M University Board Of Regents
Texas Governor Rick Perry announced the appointment of three individuals to the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Board of Regents. Their terms will expire Feb. 1, 2013.
Morris Edwin Foster of Houston is president of ExxonMobil Production Company and vice president of Exxon Mobil Corporation, where he has worked more than 40 years.
J.L. Huffines of Dallas is chairman and owner of Huffines Auto Group and formerly served in the U.S. Army. He is a former board member of the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation and is past chairman of the Texas State Senior Colleges Board of Regents.
James P. Wilson of Sugar Land is chairman and CEO of JK Acquisition Corporation, a Houston-based investment firm. He is also chairman of SupplyOne Holdings, a specialty paper manufacturing and distribution firm.
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Matthew Wright Named Chief Investment Officer at Vanderbilt University
The director of investments at Emory University was named chief investment officer at Vanderbilt University, responsible for managing its $3.4 billion endowment.
Matthew Wright will assume his duties at Vanderbilt on July 30. He will oversee the investment office responsible for managing the university's investment portfolio that includes traditional investments as well as alternatives such as real estate, hedge funds and private market investments.
Wright succeeds William T. Spitz, who announced his retirement last year, effective upon the appointment of his successor. Spitz, chief investment officer for Vanderbilt for 21 years, will continue teaching at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt.
Wright is a graduate of Seton Hall University and the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester. He was a member of the investment team responsible for overseeing the Xerox Corporation Pension and managed institutional client portfolios at Bank of America Capital Management prior to joining Emory in 2001.
At Emory, Wright helped manage a $5 billion portfolio and reported to Mary Cahill, vice president of investments and chief investment officer.
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University of Chicago's Steven Shevell Named to Lead Vision Sciences Society
Steven Shevell, Professor of Psychology and of Ophthalmology & Visual Science at the University of Chicago and a leading researcher in human vision specializing in color vision, has been elected President of the Vision Sciences Society.
He is the founding associate editor of the Journal of Vision, senior editor of Vision Research and the editor of the Optical Society of America's most recent edition of The Science of Color.
The Vision Sciences Society (VSS) is an international organization devoted to understanding how people see. While the eye is an essential part of the visual system, many basic visual functions, such as depth perception, tracking a moving object, discriminating different shapes, or recognizing faces, depend on neural processes in the brain, researchers point out.
The Vision Sciences Society brings together scientists from a broad range of disciplines and experimental approaches to advance and integrate knowledge of the neural systems in eye and brain that give the sense of vision. The society's annual meeting includes over 1,000 presentations of original research and attracts scientists from more than 35 countries.
The society includes physiologists who measure the responses of individual neurons, neuroscientists who track activity within different regions of the brain while people carry out visual tasks, psychologists who infer the characteristics of neural processes from perception and computational neuroscientists who construct models to understand interactions among millions of neurons.
Shevell joined the Chicago faculty in 1978, received an A.B. in Psychology and M.S. in Engineering from Stanford University in 1973; an M.A. in Statistics from the University of Michigan in 1975; and a Ph.D. in Psychology (mathematical psychology area) from the University of Michigan in 1977. He currently serves as chair of the Psychology Department's graduate program in Integrative Neuroscience.
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Researchers Hope to Unlock Capabilities of Carbon Nanotubes
In a three-year project that researchers say could revolutionize the electronics industry, engineers at The University of Texas at Dallas are attempting to establish a standard means for tapping the potential of carbon nanotubes.
Ever since they emerged in the early 1990s, nanotubes have promised to enable a whole new wave of technology, including ultra-fast computers that leave today's machines in their dust. But despite advances in manufacturing the tiny graphite cylinders, there's still no standard approach for making electrical contact with them.
"We think carbon nanotubes are ideal candidates to be the building blocks of electronic devices of the future, but to exploit their unique properties you have to be able to connect them to the outside world," said Dr. Moon Kim, a professor of electrical engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas and the project's principal investigator. "This will be the first time anyone has determined the extensive metal contacts that need to be established with nanotubes in order to incorporate them into new technology."
Carbon nanotubes are particularly attractive because of their ability to carry electrical current without dissipating much heat, and heat loss is one of the semiconductor industry's chief enemies as silicon chips' physical features become ever smaller.
Nanotubes themselves bring new meaning to the word "small." Their walls can be just one atom thick, forcing researchers to find a way to make an electrical connection between our big clunky world and nanotubes' almost impossibly small one.
The $225,000 grant that's funding the research is one of eight awarded through the new Nano-Bio-Information Technology Symbiosis program, or NBIT, jointly operated by the South Korean Ministry of Science and Technology and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The other U.S. universities receiving grants through the program are Harvard, Caltech, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, the University of Michigan and the University of Cincinnati.
"Not only is this research grant itself important, but it's part of a trend in which we've been successfully competing and collaborating with some of the most prestigious engineering schools in the country," said Dr. Bob Helms, dean of the Jonsson School. "And international collaborations like this are clearly going to be an increasingly important part of the way universities conduct research."
The eight grant winners emerged from a field of more than 50 research proposals submitted to NBIT. Each grant involves collaborative research between U.S. and Korean researchers. The UT Dallas researchers are collaborating with a team from South Korea's Sungkyunkwan University as well as a team from the University of Pittsburgh.
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Award Honors Princeton's Peh's Research and Outreach
Princeton's Li-Shiuan Peh has been named the winner of the 2007 Anita Borg Early Career Award by the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research.
The annual prize is presented to a female computer scientist or engineer who has made significant research contributions and whose work "has had a positive and significant impact on advancing women in the computing research community."
Peh, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, has engaged in numerous activities to advance women in technical fields. Since 2003, she has served as the faculty co-adviser of the Princeton Graduate Women in Science and Engineering organization, helping to plan activities within and beyond Princeton to attract women of all ages to science and engineering. She also has organized and participated in a summer workshop for women and underrepresented minorities in computer architecture and spoken as part of a distinguished women faculty lecture series at the University of Texas-Austin.
In her research, Peh specializes in the performance and power consumption of interconnection networks, which are used in multiprocessors and a wide array of communications systems. The holder of three patents, she served as the guest editor of the 2007 IEEE Micro special issue on on-chip networks and the program co-chair of this year's Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip.
Peh joined the University faculty in 2002 after completing her Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University in 2001. She is the previous recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship and the University's E. Lawrence Keys/Emerson Electric Co. Faculty Advancement Award, among other honors.
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Bright Future for Nano-sized Light Source
A bio-friendly nano-sized light source capable of emitting coherent light across the visible spectrum, has been invented by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California at Berkeley. Among the many potential applications of this nano-sized light source, once the technology is refined, are single cell endoscopy and other forms of subwavelength bio-imaging, integrated circuitry for nanophotonic technology, and new advanced methods of cyber cryptography.
Chemist Peidong Yang and Jan Liphardt, a biophysicist who holds a joint appointment with Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division and UC Berkeley's Physics Department, are the principal investigators behind this project
Yang and Liphardt were among the co-authors of a paper that is featured on the cover of the June 28, 2007 edition of the journal Nature. The paper is entitled: "Tunable Nanowire Nonlinear Optical Probe." Other authors of the paper were Yuri Nakayama, Peter Pauzauskie, Aleksandra Radenovic, Robert Onorato and Richard Saykally.
In this paper, the researchers describe a technique in which nanowires of potassium niobate were synthesized in a special hot water solution and separated using ultrasound. The wires were highly uniform in size, several microns long, but only about 50 nanometers in diameter. A beam from an infrared laser was used to create an optical trap that allowed individual nanowires to be grabbed and manipulated. Because of potassium niobate's unique optical properties, this same beam of infrared laser light also served as an optical pump, causing the nanowires to emit visible light whose color could be selected. In a demonstration of the technique's potential, these nanowire light sources were used to generate fluorescence from specially treated beads.
Central to the success of the nanowire light source are the exceptional nonlinear optical properties of potassium niobate. These nonlinear properties enable the frequencies of the incoming infrared light to be mixed or doubled, through techniques known respectively as second harmonic generation (SHG) or sum frequency generation (SFG), before being emitted as visible light. The result is light that is tunable as well as coherent, which fulfills a technological requirement that has posed a major challenge for both photo-imaging and photo-detection in subwavelength optics.
Coupled with earlier projects in which Yang and his research group created ultraviolet nanowire nanolasers, and made nanoribbon optical waveguides that can channel and direct light through circuitry, the new nanowire light source lays firm groundwork for future nanophotonic technology. Photonics, a technology in which the movement of light waves replaces the movement of electrons as information carriers, promises computers and networks that are thousands of times faster than what we have today.
Bio-imaging may be the field in which this nanowire light source technology has its biggest impact. Optical or visible light microscopy remains at the forefront of biological research because it allows scientists to study living cells and tissues. However, whereas the resolution of optical microscopy is limited by diffraction, through subwavelength techniques it becomes possible to visualize features smaller than visible light wavelengths. For biology, this brings normally invisible subcellular structures into view.
When a nanowire light source was touched to a fluorescent bead, the bead emitted a distinct orange fluorescence at the contact point. When the nanowire was removed, the orange fluorescence was immediately reduced 80-fold, confirming that the nanowire was the predominant source of fluorescent excitation.
Yang and Liphardt caution that the nanowire light source technology is at a very early stage of development. Liphardt compares it to where atomic force microscopy was some 10 years ago. He also says that this technology is not intended to replace existing microscopy technologies, but will enable researchers to do things that cannot be done with current technology.
This work was supported by the Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, and by the Dreyfus Foundation, the University of California, Berkeley, the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the National Science Foundation, and NASA.
